Reenactorfest 9 - Day Two (Saturday)
Saturday morning I slept until around 8:00 or 8:30, then dragged my carcass out of bed and put on my workout clothes. I took the stairs down to the first floor and spent 30 minutes walking down all the various hallways in the hotel. The place is HUGE (PDF). I checked my pedometer after I walked all the hallways in red on the map, and one lap around was over a mile. I only had to repeat one hallway to get in 30 minutes of walking.
After my walk I treated myself to a little bit of Internets, then wrote some notes for my Live Journal entries. I grabbed a shower, then headed down to the breakfast buffet. After a ham and cheese omelet I headed down for some shopping and visiting. Things were already hopping. I decided (since dragoneyes19 asked so nicely) to take some photos of the encampments before it got too busy. So I walked around snapping pictures before things got too crowded. Of course I stopped into the Bristol encampment to say good morning.
At 11:00 I trekked down to the seminar rooms for the Women in Reenacting Roundtable. When I arrived the chairs were set up in a circle, so I sat in the second ring. It seemed like the moderator was one of the women from the Bristol court guild (Guild of St. George). This was a rerun of a panel that has run at least twice before, and as usual, it made me very grateful that our Guild was founded by three women and two men. It sounds like there are way too many reenacting groups out there where the attitude is “No girls allowed.” Now, I know there are guys who want to shoot guns and then drink beer. But that’s no excuse for being a jerk when women want to play too.
There was one woman there who had so much trouble with the men in her unit, that she and her girlfriends decided to start their own unit so that the boys couldn’t tell them what to do anymore. Now they set up their own encampment and do things they way they want to. More than one woman told a story about how the men in their unit didn’t appreciate them, didn’t want them, or wouldn’t allow them to participate. One woman in a Civil War group isn’t allowed to lay out her cooking implements, because the leader of her unit insists that they have an “authentic” camp, and apparently that means the cooks didn’t have any gear.
The moderator told the story of being at a big event at Jamestown where Ronald Reagan and the French Ambassador were there and all the reenactors were going to parade in front of the reviewing stand. Except that word came down that the women weren’t going to be part of the parade. Nobody came out and said exactly why, but the implication was if you were a camp follower, you were a whore and they weren’t going to parade whores in front of the President. The only good part about that story was that, when the women were supposed to turn off and not parade in front of the grandstand, she missed the turn off and ended up marching with her unit. Hee! She said, “I wish it had been on purpose, but the truth is I just missed the turn off.”
The one other interesting thing about the panel was a young woman doing a Celtic impression was complaining that people don’t give her a chance to explain her nail polish. Apparently Celtic women used madder to dye their nails. Fascinating! I would have just assumed that she had forgotten to take off her modern nail polish, not that it was part of her impression. I suggested that rather than waiting for people to ask, find a way to set up her display so that she could bring it up, like having period cosmetic jars out on display. I mentioned how we have religious items all around camp, so we can bring up the subject of how the Guild members are still Catholic, not Lutheran. After the panel she thanked me for the idea and said she was going to try it out.
After the panel I headed back to the vendor’s room for more shopping. I ended up finishing up taking photos of the encampments. I’d e-mailed Jennifer about lappet caps, and was waiting to hear back. So I found a seat at one of the lunch tables and checked my e-mail on my phone. While was sitting there, a couple that I don’t know from the Bristol gang came and sat at the table. But it turns out he was the guy who does their awesome medical show (Greg Marshall) and his wife (I didn’t remember her name, and the only reason I know his is because I stumbled across him on Facebook the other day.) I saw his show when we visited Bristol five years ago.
I felt like I needed a little bit of quiet, so I headed away from the crowds to go have lunch in the hotel café. Which was probably a mistake. One, the food was horrible (I had a hamburger that resembled a hockey puck) and two, I sat next to a table of rude muggles. About half the folks in the café were not reenactors. At one table were a pipe and drum band in their kilts (they were playing later in the afternoon) and at another table was this one HORRIBLE over-the-top non-reenactor pirate with an entire peacock on his hat, wearing a ship’s wheel as the sporran for his OMGWTFBBQ kilt! Dude, you would never climb rigging in a kilt. *eyeroll* The muggles next to me were loudly making comments about all the freaky people in costumes. I tried to pretend that I couldn’t hear them, but it was hard. Assholes. And then some of their friends showed up, toting well thumbed Bibles. Really? You all are Christians? You sure as hell don’t act like it.
After lunch I headed back to the main hall for some more shopping. One of the vendors seemed really familiar. I knew I’d been on her Web site before. [Now that I’ve had time to track it down turns out I had seen her on the Web. (I’m linking to a blog post by American Duchess rather than her etsy store because 1) I think that’s where I heard of her and 2) it’s got photos of her. Check out her fabulous towering18th century hair!)] I purchased a busk from her, and a copy of her How to Assemble 18th Century Stays book. I also picked up a book on tailoring from one of the other book vendors.
I spend a considerable amount of time hanging out in the Bristol Tavern, chatting with the girls. When I noticed that someone’s bloomers where hanging on the tavern roof. Hee! Turns out the drawstring had given way on Katie’s bloomers. While she was having a conversation with Bollow! *guffaws* Whoops!
I finally decided it was time to trek back up to the room and clean out my shopping basket. When I checked my e-mail again, I found out that Jane the Phoole wasn’t going to make to ReenactorFest after all. *sad panda* I’d e-mailed and asked if we could have dinner with her again, since I so enjoyed dining with her last year. She’s just a fabulous human being.
At 3:00 I headed back downstairs for Bob Charron’s talk, Medieval Culture and Thought. He was having a bit of trouble with the audio visual, so Stephen and Alena were volunteering their laptop and assistance. It was really cool that he had visual aids this year. But then again, Every. Single. Time. I hear that man speak, he just blows my mind.
Several years ago he started a translation of Fiore dei Liberi, the 15th century Italian sword master. But once he got through the first pass, he decided that he needed to better understand how people in the 15th century would have understood the work, so he started on a “classical” education. He studied all the same things that an educated medieval person would have known. In his talk, he spoke about the Trivum
1. Grammar - Teaching you how to speak without error. (NOT write, speak)
2. Dialectic (aka dialog)/Logic - No one needs to be right, (logic is the truth, dialectic is the discussion. I really love the idea that in a dialog, both sides get to talk and neither side has to be right or win! Oh, the lost art of dialog....)
3. Rhetoric - To persuade someone to any good purpose. If the purpose is not to the good, it’s not rhetoric.
He talked about how the verbal path is the Threefold Path. And he talked about the Quadrivium, which focuses on numbers, because we have to quantify things:
1. Mathematics = numbers
2. Geometry = numbers in space
3. Music = numbers in time
4. Astronomy = numbers in space AND time
He talked about how everything that they taught in the middle ages, they had multiple ways to teach. And how they hit both sides of the brain (verbal and mathematical). He mentioned how at this time, everyone speaks Latin, it’s the language of the educated class. When educated people get together, they all speak a common language (unlike today, he pointed out. Hee!) “Illiterate” means that you haven’t had your classical letters, that you don’t speak/write Latin. DaVinci was illiterate. Yes, we have his notebooks, he wrote in Italian. He didn’t speak/write Latin.
He also talked about how peasant was a job description, not a social class. He told an anecdote about a poor knight who only owned the cloak on his back, spending the night in a peasant’s cottage, who had 20 servants.
One of the parts of his talk that really blew my mind was about Astrology. I’ve never been much for horoscopes. But Bob said that astrological symbols and the order in which they appear are important to the medieval person. He showed a couple of different pictures of Zodiac Man. Rats. I guess I’m going to have to start studying up on horoscopes now. =P He showed a Durer woodcut of the Heavens. An image of Zodiac Man from the duc de Berry. And another one in color, that showed the signs of the zodiac on the human body.
Bob talked about how the four elements were the states of matter:
• Earth = Solid
• Water = Liquid
• Air = Gas
• Fire = Energy
And then he talked about how the Male was Electric (random activity) and the Female was Magnetic (draws things to it). He showed a picture of DaVinci’s Vitruvian man and talked about the geometry. The Square = Earth = Body and the Circle = Heaven = Soul. He said that the proportions are correct, if you draw a circle in the space above his head (above the line) the big circle is the circumference of the sun, and the small circle would be the circumference of the moon.
Then Bob talked some more about geometry. He showed am image of circles and square and talked about how if you draw a circle, then draw a square where all four corners touch the edges of the circle. Then draw a circle inside the square that touches the edges of the square. The small circle, will be exactly half the big circle. Then he showed an image of circles and triangles and talked about how if you draw a circle, then draw an equilateral triangle where all three corners touch the circle. Then draw a circle inside the triangle, where the edges of the circle touch the triangle. Again, the little circle is half of the big circle. “If you’re an architect, that’s all you need to know.” *mind blown* Why didn’t they teach us this in school when we were doing geometry? It would have made math SO MUCH more interesting!
Then he showed an image with five geometric shapes where:
Cube = Earth
Tetrahedron = Fire
Dodecahedron = The Universe
Icosahedron = Water
Octahedron = Air
Then he showed a picture of Fra Luca Pacioli. He said the man on the right is Albrecht Durer. I couldn’t help but notice the geometric shapes in the painting. Hee! “This is all high level science. They’re just expressing it in a different way.” *mind blown again*
After his lecture, I followed Bob back into the main exhibit hall, where he was doing a demo at 4:00 with Chris L. That’s when I found out that the horrible BlueBeard dude in the kilt was not a reenactor, but one of the hired performers. Thank all the gods. That explains why he gave off more of a cheesy renn faire vibe than a historical vibe.
Their demo was called “The Arts of Mars: A Lesson in Swordplay.” This involved lessons on the same sort, but this time applied to swordplay. It was quite interesting to go immediately from his talk to the demo. He talked about how the person who wins a fight is the person who moves the least.
1 = Just move your hand
2 = Move your hand and your body
3 = Move your hand, body, and foot
4 = Move your hand, body, and both feet
The fighter who makes the smallest number of moves, WINS. “We’re not aiming to go fast, we’re going small.” You respond to an attack with less. Preferably TWO less (i.e. if they attack with 3, you want to respond with 2 or 1.) He brought up the Quadrivium again. He talked about geometry (numbers in space), how you measure your lines in feet (as in feet and inches) and you measure the circles you make with your sword in degrees. Then he talked about how music (numbers in time) is all about ratio, ¾ time, etc. “You don’t have to be an athlete to do this. You just have to know math.” [At which point I’m thinking maybe that’s why I never felt like I was going to be a great swordsman!] Then he brought up Astronomy (numbers in space AND time) again, “Now we have to move. How far away are they? Who is in motion?”
After their talk I did a little socializing, hung out in the Bristol Tavern. I chatted with Daniel for a bit, and took some photos of his spiffy new garb. Yeah, he looks a little stiff. But that’s because we were trying to reproduce one of the woodcuts that he’d modeled it after. I did some more shopping, and spent a bit more time with the Templar ladies. It turns out they’re the Knights of Saint Maurice. Hee! (We’re the Guild of Saint Moritz, same patron saint!) I finally went upstairs to get changed for dinner. Whoops! Got the time wrong again, I was just pulling off my clothes when Stephen called. Luckily, it didn’t take me long to throw on my wool gown, as I’d left it laid out on the bed.
We went to TGIFriday’s for dinner. Where a very short Julie, tall bar stools, and a heavy wool gown with a train do NOT mix. I spent several minutes trying to shimmy into a chair, realized that I was actually going to need the little foot rails around the tables in order to stay ON the chair, so I had to move over one seat to line up with the foot rails. Grand total time it took me to get into the chair, get my skirt properly situated under my arse and get comfortable so I didn’t feel like I was falling off it was probably ten minutes. *sighs*
It was a very LONG dinner. Yes, there were over a dozen of us. But that still doesn’t excuse how long it took us to get served. Hello? Yes, we’re having fun and talking, but we’d still like to eat at some point too. The entire dinner took over two hours. Sheesh. Why is it that places are never able to hand big parties? We’d been there over an hour before we even saw appetizers. Luckily the company was more than excellent. I ended up sitting next to Bob Charron. *huge grin* so I got to listen to all his great stories. He had quite the wild child youth. I think he was raised by his grandmother, and she sounded like a formidable woman too. (He told a story of her tossing a neighborhood kid over a fence because he’s come into the yard and was messing with her grandkids. Eep!). Listening to Bob and Rick trade stories about concerts they went to in their youth was a hoot too. Ah, the 1970s.
When we got back to the hotel, I was ready for some quiet “me” time. I wasn’t even planning to lurk outside the ball to people watch and see what folks were wearing. Except that I decided I was definitely in need of some chocolate. Luckily, the little “general store” down on Bourbon Street was still open. I bought a Reese’s at the gift shop, and a carton of milk at the snack bar, then headed back up to my room. Heaven. But by the time I was done writing up notes and searching Facebook (and failing) for the Knights of Saint Maurice (because they’re listed under Days of Knights) I was ready for bed. I didn’t have the energy to watch a movie. So bed it was.
After my walk I treated myself to a little bit of Internets, then wrote some notes for my Live Journal entries. I grabbed a shower, then headed down to the breakfast buffet. After a ham and cheese omelet I headed down for some shopping and visiting. Things were already hopping. I decided (since dragoneyes19 asked so nicely) to take some photos of the encampments before it got too busy. So I walked around snapping pictures before things got too crowded. Of course I stopped into the Bristol encampment to say good morning.
At 11:00 I trekked down to the seminar rooms for the Women in Reenacting Roundtable. When I arrived the chairs were set up in a circle, so I sat in the second ring. It seemed like the moderator was one of the women from the Bristol court guild (Guild of St. George). This was a rerun of a panel that has run at least twice before, and as usual, it made me very grateful that our Guild was founded by three women and two men. It sounds like there are way too many reenacting groups out there where the attitude is “No girls allowed.” Now, I know there are guys who want to shoot guns and then drink beer. But that’s no excuse for being a jerk when women want to play too.
There was one woman there who had so much trouble with the men in her unit, that she and her girlfriends decided to start their own unit so that the boys couldn’t tell them what to do anymore. Now they set up their own encampment and do things they way they want to. More than one woman told a story about how the men in their unit didn’t appreciate them, didn’t want them, or wouldn’t allow them to participate. One woman in a Civil War group isn’t allowed to lay out her cooking implements, because the leader of her unit insists that they have an “authentic” camp, and apparently that means the cooks didn’t have any gear.
The moderator told the story of being at a big event at Jamestown where Ronald Reagan and the French Ambassador were there and all the reenactors were going to parade in front of the reviewing stand. Except that word came down that the women weren’t going to be part of the parade. Nobody came out and said exactly why, but the implication was if you were a camp follower, you were a whore and they weren’t going to parade whores in front of the President. The only good part about that story was that, when the women were supposed to turn off and not parade in front of the grandstand, she missed the turn off and ended up marching with her unit. Hee! She said, “I wish it had been on purpose, but the truth is I just missed the turn off.”
The one other interesting thing about the panel was a young woman doing a Celtic impression was complaining that people don’t give her a chance to explain her nail polish. Apparently Celtic women used madder to dye their nails. Fascinating! I would have just assumed that she had forgotten to take off her modern nail polish, not that it was part of her impression. I suggested that rather than waiting for people to ask, find a way to set up her display so that she could bring it up, like having period cosmetic jars out on display. I mentioned how we have religious items all around camp, so we can bring up the subject of how the Guild members are still Catholic, not Lutheran. After the panel she thanked me for the idea and said she was going to try it out.
After the panel I headed back to the vendor’s room for more shopping. I ended up finishing up taking photos of the encampments. I’d e-mailed Jennifer about lappet caps, and was waiting to hear back. So I found a seat at one of the lunch tables and checked my e-mail on my phone. While was sitting there, a couple that I don’t know from the Bristol gang came and sat at the table. But it turns out he was the guy who does their awesome medical show (Greg Marshall) and his wife (I didn’t remember her name, and the only reason I know his is because I stumbled across him on Facebook the other day.) I saw his show when we visited Bristol five years ago.
I felt like I needed a little bit of quiet, so I headed away from the crowds to go have lunch in the hotel café. Which was probably a mistake. One, the food was horrible (I had a hamburger that resembled a hockey puck) and two, I sat next to a table of rude muggles. About half the folks in the café were not reenactors. At one table were a pipe and drum band in their kilts (they were playing later in the afternoon) and at another table was this one HORRIBLE over-the-top non-reenactor pirate with an entire peacock on his hat, wearing a ship’s wheel as the sporran for his OMGWTFBBQ kilt! Dude, you would never climb rigging in a kilt. *eyeroll* The muggles next to me were loudly making comments about all the freaky people in costumes. I tried to pretend that I couldn’t hear them, but it was hard. Assholes. And then some of their friends showed up, toting well thumbed Bibles. Really? You all are Christians? You sure as hell don’t act like it.
After lunch I headed back to the main hall for some more shopping. One of the vendors seemed really familiar. I knew I’d been on her Web site before. [Now that I’ve had time to track it down turns out I had seen her on the Web. (I’m linking to a blog post by American Duchess rather than her etsy store because 1) I think that’s where I heard of her and 2) it’s got photos of her. Check out her fabulous towering18th century hair!)] I purchased a busk from her, and a copy of her How to Assemble 18th Century Stays book. I also picked up a book on tailoring from one of the other book vendors.
I spend a considerable amount of time hanging out in the Bristol Tavern, chatting with the girls. When I noticed that someone’s bloomers where hanging on the tavern roof. Hee! Turns out the drawstring had given way on Katie’s bloomers. While she was having a conversation with Bollow! *guffaws* Whoops!
I finally decided it was time to trek back up to the room and clean out my shopping basket. When I checked my e-mail again, I found out that Jane the Phoole wasn’t going to make to ReenactorFest after all. *sad panda* I’d e-mailed and asked if we could have dinner with her again, since I so enjoyed dining with her last year. She’s just a fabulous human being.
At 3:00 I headed back downstairs for Bob Charron’s talk, Medieval Culture and Thought. He was having a bit of trouble with the audio visual, so Stephen and Alena were volunteering their laptop and assistance. It was really cool that he had visual aids this year. But then again, Every. Single. Time. I hear that man speak, he just blows my mind.
Several years ago he started a translation of Fiore dei Liberi, the 15th century Italian sword master. But once he got through the first pass, he decided that he needed to better understand how people in the 15th century would have understood the work, so he started on a “classical” education. He studied all the same things that an educated medieval person would have known. In his talk, he spoke about the Trivum
1. Grammar - Teaching you how to speak without error. (NOT write, speak)
2. Dialectic (aka dialog)/Logic - No one needs to be right, (logic is the truth, dialectic is the discussion. I really love the idea that in a dialog, both sides get to talk and neither side has to be right or win! Oh, the lost art of dialog....)
3. Rhetoric - To persuade someone to any good purpose. If the purpose is not to the good, it’s not rhetoric.
He talked about how the verbal path is the Threefold Path. And he talked about the Quadrivium, which focuses on numbers, because we have to quantify things:
1. Mathematics = numbers
2. Geometry = numbers in space
3. Music = numbers in time
4. Astronomy = numbers in space AND time
He talked about how everything that they taught in the middle ages, they had multiple ways to teach. And how they hit both sides of the brain (verbal and mathematical). He mentioned how at this time, everyone speaks Latin, it’s the language of the educated class. When educated people get together, they all speak a common language (unlike today, he pointed out. Hee!) “Illiterate” means that you haven’t had your classical letters, that you don’t speak/write Latin. DaVinci was illiterate. Yes, we have his notebooks, he wrote in Italian. He didn’t speak/write Latin.
He also talked about how peasant was a job description, not a social class. He told an anecdote about a poor knight who only owned the cloak on his back, spending the night in a peasant’s cottage, who had 20 servants.
One of the parts of his talk that really blew my mind was about Astrology. I’ve never been much for horoscopes. But Bob said that astrological symbols and the order in which they appear are important to the medieval person. He showed a couple of different pictures of Zodiac Man. Rats. I guess I’m going to have to start studying up on horoscopes now. =P He showed a Durer woodcut of the Heavens. An image of Zodiac Man from the duc de Berry. And another one in color, that showed the signs of the zodiac on the human body.
Bob talked about how the four elements were the states of matter:
• Earth = Solid
• Water = Liquid
• Air = Gas
• Fire = Energy
And then he talked about how the Male was Electric (random activity) and the Female was Magnetic (draws things to it). He showed a picture of DaVinci’s Vitruvian man and talked about the geometry. The Square = Earth = Body and the Circle = Heaven = Soul. He said that the proportions are correct, if you draw a circle in the space above his head (above the line) the big circle is the circumference of the sun, and the small circle would be the circumference of the moon.
Then Bob talked some more about geometry. He showed am image of circles and square and talked about how if you draw a circle, then draw a square where all four corners touch the edges of the circle. Then draw a circle inside the square that touches the edges of the square. The small circle, will be exactly half the big circle. Then he showed an image of circles and triangles and talked about how if you draw a circle, then draw an equilateral triangle where all three corners touch the circle. Then draw a circle inside the triangle, where the edges of the circle touch the triangle. Again, the little circle is half of the big circle. “If you’re an architect, that’s all you need to know.” *mind blown* Why didn’t they teach us this in school when we were doing geometry? It would have made math SO MUCH more interesting!
Then he showed an image with five geometric shapes where:
Cube = Earth
Tetrahedron = Fire
Dodecahedron = The Universe
Icosahedron = Water
Octahedron = Air
Then he showed a picture of Fra Luca Pacioli. He said the man on the right is Albrecht Durer. I couldn’t help but notice the geometric shapes in the painting. Hee! “This is all high level science. They’re just expressing it in a different way.” *mind blown again*
After his lecture, I followed Bob back into the main exhibit hall, where he was doing a demo at 4:00 with Chris L. That’s when I found out that the horrible BlueBeard dude in the kilt was not a reenactor, but one of the hired performers. Thank all the gods. That explains why he gave off more of a cheesy renn faire vibe than a historical vibe.
Their demo was called “The Arts of Mars: A Lesson in Swordplay.” This involved lessons on the same sort, but this time applied to swordplay. It was quite interesting to go immediately from his talk to the demo. He talked about how the person who wins a fight is the person who moves the least.
1 = Just move your hand
2 = Move your hand and your body
3 = Move your hand, body, and foot
4 = Move your hand, body, and both feet
The fighter who makes the smallest number of moves, WINS. “We’re not aiming to go fast, we’re going small.” You respond to an attack with less. Preferably TWO less (i.e. if they attack with 3, you want to respond with 2 or 1.) He brought up the Quadrivium again. He talked about geometry (numbers in space), how you measure your lines in feet (as in feet and inches) and you measure the circles you make with your sword in degrees. Then he talked about how music (numbers in time) is all about ratio, ¾ time, etc. “You don’t have to be an athlete to do this. You just have to know math.” [At which point I’m thinking maybe that’s why I never felt like I was going to be a great swordsman!] Then he brought up Astronomy (numbers in space AND time) again, “Now we have to move. How far away are they? Who is in motion?”
After their talk I did a little socializing, hung out in the Bristol Tavern. I chatted with Daniel for a bit, and took some photos of his spiffy new garb. Yeah, he looks a little stiff. But that’s because we were trying to reproduce one of the woodcuts that he’d modeled it after. I did some more shopping, and spent a bit more time with the Templar ladies. It turns out they’re the Knights of Saint Maurice. Hee! (We’re the Guild of Saint Moritz, same patron saint!) I finally went upstairs to get changed for dinner. Whoops! Got the time wrong again, I was just pulling off my clothes when Stephen called. Luckily, it didn’t take me long to throw on my wool gown, as I’d left it laid out on the bed.
We went to TGIFriday’s for dinner. Where a very short Julie, tall bar stools, and a heavy wool gown with a train do NOT mix. I spent several minutes trying to shimmy into a chair, realized that I was actually going to need the little foot rails around the tables in order to stay ON the chair, so I had to move over one seat to line up with the foot rails. Grand total time it took me to get into the chair, get my skirt properly situated under my arse and get comfortable so I didn’t feel like I was falling off it was probably ten minutes. *sighs*
It was a very LONG dinner. Yes, there were over a dozen of us. But that still doesn’t excuse how long it took us to get served. Hello? Yes, we’re having fun and talking, but we’d still like to eat at some point too. The entire dinner took over two hours. Sheesh. Why is it that places are never able to hand big parties? We’d been there over an hour before we even saw appetizers. Luckily the company was more than excellent. I ended up sitting next to Bob Charron. *huge grin* so I got to listen to all his great stories. He had quite the wild child youth. I think he was raised by his grandmother, and she sounded like a formidable woman too. (He told a story of her tossing a neighborhood kid over a fence because he’s come into the yard and was messing with her grandkids. Eep!). Listening to Bob and Rick trade stories about concerts they went to in their youth was a hoot too. Ah, the 1970s.
When we got back to the hotel, I was ready for some quiet “me” time. I wasn’t even planning to lurk outside the ball to people watch and see what folks were wearing. Except that I decided I was definitely in need of some chocolate. Luckily, the little “general store” down on Bourbon Street was still open. I bought a Reese’s at the gift shop, and a carton of milk at the snack bar, then headed back up to my room. Heaven. But by the time I was done writing up notes and searching Facebook (and failing) for the Knights of Saint Maurice (because they’re listed under Days of Knights) I was ready for bed. I didn’t have the energy to watch a movie. So bed it was.